Casey Bar the Door! Schmitt is Letting the Dingers Fly!
SF Giants Minor Lines, April 12-14, 2024
Photo Credit: Kevin Cunningham | Giant Futures
We got dingers this weekend! Big dingers. Important dingers. Game-winning dingers. It was fun!
I don’t know how many of you have picked up on the fact that the system has been a slight bit dinger-depressed — if not entirely dinger-deprived — over the very early going portion of the season.
Going into the weekend, the four affiliates had combined for just 21 home runs in 32 games — with nearly half of those coming in a three-game stretch during Sacramento’s trip to Reno. That three-game-explosion also accounts for nearly two-thirds of the players in the system who have hit more than one home run this year. Of the 20 players who have managed to try out their home run trots so far in 2024, just three have done it at least twice — and two of those three (Jakson Reetz and Luis Matos) managed the feat in single games in Reno. Only Heliot Ramos, who leads the organization with four round-trippers, has actually homered in multiple different games this season (more on Heliot in a sec).
The paucity of power production has resulted in a lack of synergy between the teams so far on the year — it’s been hard to report homers in multiple locations on any given night. Heading into the weekend, we had yet to see more than two affiliates go deep on the same date, and that had only happened three times….until Friday!
Yes, Friday was a virtual dinger fest, with three different affiliates going deep! (San Jose, which actually played two games that night, was the lone holdout). They only managed the trick once apiece (multi-homer efforts are still something of a work in progress, especially at the lower levels), but they made up for lack of quantity by maximizing the impact of each of those big swings.
So get ready for some Big Bangs! We got it going on this weekend (though admittedly, the following day reverted to form with just one long ball across the farm on Saturday. I guess the big league club used them all up that day).
HITTER of the WEEKEND: Casey Schmitt (Sac) 8 for 13, 3 HR (3), 4 R, 9 RBI, 2 K
PITCHER of the WEEKEND: Mason Black (Sac), 5.0 IP, 0 H, 0 R, 2 BB, 7 K
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